In trying to get up to speed (no pun intended) on accelerationism, I came upon this nifty flowchart which is quite good. (“A diagram posted to 4chan /pol/ outlining the origins and effects of Cultural Marxism, i.e. the Jews did it. The image is of unknown provenance, posted to /pol/ by an anonymous creator.”).
Star Wars was released 40 years ago yesterday.
In the pre-internet, pre-cable-TV days of 1977, all we had in my household growing up was TV Guide. Before ‘Star Wars’ came out, I was perusing an issue of the magazine, and towards the back of the issue I came across a full-page, glossy advertisement for the movie. I knew nothing about the film, nor what it would be about, but the visceral experience I had, just looking at this poster (the iconic “Style A” poster painted by Tom Jung) is one of those childhood experiences I’ll never forget.
The images in that poster grabbed me, resonated with me profoundly, and pulled me in. I *had* to see whatever this movie was about. (I was 9 years old at the time.)
The collective images — Luke’s heroic pose, with arms stretched high and light saber in hand; Princess Leia at Luke’s feet, like something from a Frank Frazetta drawing; and that oversized image of Vader’s head signaling quite strongly (I now believe) the presence of a Shadow figure.
To this day, I believe that poster was a distillation of the film, and that both artifacts tapped into Jungian archetypes and Campbell’s notion of the monomyth (both of which Lucas was greatly influenced by.) Insofar as one believes in the existence of a collective unconscious, this poster’s effect is a paragon example.
As I’ve mentioned before, I regularly check out Rod Dreher’s writing, not because I agree with him, but because he is an important voice in the conversation.
In “Debate Me, Dreher”, Nathan Duffy expresses a sentiment I’ve long held, the bothersome tendency of Dreher to not engage with solid arguments from the Alt Right / NRx:
It’s the only gentlemanly thing to do, Rod. You’ve been ably fielding criticisms of the Benedict Option from your left for months, taking on all comers. Meanwhile your engagement with those to your right has been notably minimal, if not entirely non-existent. Indeed, from the policing of your comment section and blocking habits on Twitter, it seems you’re inclined to flee the field entirely when faced with criticisms from your right.
Dreher also has the annoying tendency — particularly after a horrific terrorist attack — to occasionally drift into identitarian territory, only to snap back into his kneejerk, default mode of Christian liberal humanism.
As the institutional elites try to cajole us into accepting domestic Islamic terrorism as ‘the New Normal’, P.T. Carlo reminds us of this poignant scene from Brazil (“The Brazilification of the West”). As one YouTube commenter observes, note the music the band starts playing after the explosion. Oi vey!
The 2nd half of the song, that begins around 2:51, is epic.
WND is reporting that Donna Brazile is snooping into the Seth Rich story:
WASHINGTON – Former Democratic National Committee interim chairwoman Donna Brazile is the high-ranking DNC representative who allegedly called police and the family of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich and demanded to know why a private investigator was “snooping” into Rich’s death, the private eye revealed to WND Monday.
“The high-ranking DNC official that called the police after I inquired about Rich’s case was Donna Brazile,” veteran homicide detective Rod Wheeler told WND. “Why shouldn’t I reveal who it was?”
… and then WND’s Twitter account was promptly suspended.
Huh.
Meanwhile, the George Soros-funded, David Brock-run organization Media Matters is making headway in their Alinsky-ite attempt to peel off FNC advertisers from Hannity’s timeslot, hoping to replicate their contributing role in getting Bill O’Reilly canned.
The increasingly-cuck FNC has retracted a Seth Rich story, and CNN reports that “four sources at Fox told CNNMoney that Hannity did face internal pressure to back off the Rich story…”
The rest of the MSM, naturally, presumes the possibility that Seth Rich may have been the source of the Podesta emails, and that this in turn may have something to do with his murder, is laughable nonsense, not even worth looking into (e.g., NYT: “Sean Hannity, a Murder and Why Fake News Endures”).
Is Kim Dotcom correct in saying that Seth Rich was the source of the Podesta emails sent to Wikileaks? Ha, ha, ha! We’re not going to look into that! It’s not like it’s an empirical question.
The leftwing Guardian newspaper (reluctantly, I’m sure) reports:
More than half of Britons believe their culture is threatened by ethnic minorities living in the UK, a report says.
A quarter think immigrants take jobs away and a third think they remove more from society than they contribute, this year’s Aurora Humanitarian Index survey said…
The 2017 Aurora Humanitarian Index surveyed nearly 6,500 people in 12 countries.
In the UK it found:
56% of people felt local culture was threatened by ethnic minorities.
24% felt migrants took jobs away but half believed their impact was neutral.
34% thought migrants took more from society than they contributed.
The Violent Antifa Professor has been arrested:
The hit and run Anti-White masked assailant whom The Roper Report has reported to you on twice already has been arrested! “Former” college professor Eric Clanton is being held on a $200,000 bond after he violently struck a kneeling, unarmed free speech advocate in the head with a bike lock causing serious injury. The AntiFa teacher was virtually unmasked and doxxed by patriots in 4chan. Hey kids, doxxing works, that’s why Antifa fear it so much!
The leftwing newspaper The Guardian has a piece titled “Hiding in plain sight: how the ‘alt-right’ is weaponizing irony to spread fascism”
Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine the combination of street violence meeting internet memes. But experts say that the “alt-right” have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponizing irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents.
Last week, the Data & Society Institute released a report on the online disinformation and manipulation that is increasingly shaping US politics. The report focused on the way in which far-right actors “spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture”.
One the report’s authors, Dr Alice Marwick, says that fascist tropes first merged with irony in the murkier corners of the internet before being adopted by the “alt-right” as a tool. For the new far-right movement, “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.”
Hmmm… a trope to simultaneously affirm and deny and Alt-Right position, emerging in a climate of intensifying Political Correctness. I wonder why that might be?
In other words, troll culture became a way for fascism to hide in plain sight.
Okay.
Ryan Milner teaches Communication at the College of Charleston, and is the co-author of a new book called The Ambivalent Internet. The book ponders the implications of Poe’s law, an internet adage that points to the difficulties of online communication and of distinguishing extremist views from parodies.
“Unless you have an obvious marker of another person’s intent, you can’t really gauge their intent. They could be messing around. They could be deadly serious. They could be a mix of both,” Milner says…
Author Alexander Reid Ross agrees that irony has been deployed by the far right in chipping away at whatever prohibitions have existed around publicly adopting far-right politics. His book, Against the Fascist Creep, published late last year, explores the long history of fascists attempting to mainstream their ideas, or even sell them to the left.
“Fascism is more or less a social taboo. It’s unacceptable in modern society,” Ross says. “Humour or irony is one of the ways that they can put forward their affective positions without having to fall back on any affirmative ideological positions.”
He adds: “They’re putting forward the anger, the sense of betrayal, the need for revenge, the resentment, the violence. They’re putting forward the male fantasies, the desire for a national community and a sense of unity and a rejection of Muslims. They’re doing all of that, but they’re not stating it.”
Another, much more simple way to put it: The Alt Right is simply appropriating the successful tactics of the ‘60s-era leftist counterculture. The Left is no longer the counterculture… they are now the mainstream culture.
Now, it is the Right’s turn to be the transgressive counter-culture.
Get ready. It’s gonna be fun.
Aeon has a piece titled “Who names diseases?”, by byline which reads: “Swine Flu, Naples Soldier, Ebola. Disease names express fear, create stigma and distract attention. Can they be improved?”
Here is a choice paragraph, which inadvertently shows the backwardness of Arab societies:
“The WHO hoped that by halting politically inspired names, it would enhance public health. After all, the fallout from misnaming a disease can be devastating. The 2009 flu pandemic was initially dubbed swine flu. It was actually spread by humans, not pigs, but the Egyptian government still ordered the slaughter of the country’s pig population – some 300,000 animals, mostly belonging to the Coptic minority – in a misguided attempt to halt the contagion.”
No comment needed.
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.
